When a genre is firmly established, two things generally happen - you end up with your niche fans who almost exclusively live and breathe said games, and you start to push out a lot of regular folk who are sick of seeing the same thing over and over again. Still, the tower defense gameplay has remained a popular one despite its almost rigorous formula. Even still, it's nice to be reminded that there are still fresh ideas to be explored and Corn Quest by Namco manages to nicely use the iOS' touch-screen controls to great effect.

The long and short of the narrative is that an alien gas has transformed both the bugs and corn of a field, with the corn setting up defenses to prevent their brethren from being eaten. Unlike a regular tower defense game, your towers are considered mostly temporary. Although you can place up a large wall of corn designed to whittle down and kill the bugs one by one, they'll shoot back and kill the first corn they can see.

As such you'll want to protect your expensive, but high-utility corn with the cheaper grunts, allowing them to absorb the blows in their 'stead. If you happen to be fast enough and concerned about high-scores, you can also drag and plant the corn in to new slots elsewhere on the map, though this kind of micro-management can border on excessive during hectic battles.

All of this would be absolutely magnificent if not for the controls and tower placement system combining to make things frustrating. There are only so many slots in a given area to place corn, indicated by glowing rings that are obscured by the corn you've placed down. This means you'll have to resort to 'spamming' taps in a given area to replenish your wall of grunts, while moving them around becomes all but fruitless as you struggle to select them on smaller iOS screens.

There are power-ups to even out the odds, though only the 'area heal' can be purchased over-and-over with the coins you earn on a map. All others require IAP to replenish, with no alternative currently available. This can put a dampener on things; they're not required to complete the game, but they are fun to deploy.

While the game does play around with the temporary nature of your units, it's over all too quickly, leaving the endless and sudden death modes to support all of the game's replay value. Ultimately Corn Quest is a tower defense that's best appreciated by genre fans, but the basic 'spammy' nature of deploying units can be appealing to newcomers as well.